Many writers have claimed that research and development (R&D) has two ‘faces’. In addition to the conventional role of stimulating innovation, R&D enhances technology transfer by improving the ability of firms to learn about advances in the leading edge (‘absorptive capacity’). In this paper we explore this idea empirically using a panel of industries across twelve OECD countries. We find evide...

The use of foreign direct investment as a channel of international spillovers is by now fairly established in the empirical literature on innovation and growth. It is often argued that subsidiaries of foreign multinational enterprises are a mechanism through which technological know-how flows across borders. For foreign subsidiaries to be channels of international spillovers, these subsidiaries...

This paper presents an endogenous growth model that captures the origins of path dependence and technological lock-in and introduces a mechanism of induced innovation, which can trigger new research. Imperfect spillovers of secondary development can make the development of new technologies unattractive until research ceases in the long run. Changes in the relative supply of primary factors act ...

We study the implications of the creative destruction lifecycle of innovation for asset prices. We develop a general equilibrium model of endogenous firm creation and destruction where “incremental” innovations by incumbents and “radical” innovations by entrants drive the volatility of growth prospects of the economy. Higher entry—bigger threat of displacement of incumbents by entrants—implies ...

Here we perform the same kind of “integration experiments” as in Rivera-Batiz and Romer (1991), this time in the context of a “quality ladder model”, where international trade integration is not enough to prevent redundancy of R&D efforts. Thus a further kind of integration is analysed: “financial market integration”. We adopt as a setup the Simple Schumpeterian Model in Aghion and Howitt (2005...

Technological Innovation, Financial Fragility and Complex Dynamics In this paper we suggest a scaling approach to business cycles. We develop a heterogeneous interacting agents (HIAs) model that replicates well known industrial dynamics stylized facts, as the power law distribution of firms’ size and the Laplace distribution of firms’ growth rates. In particular, the power law is a persistent b...

This paper presents a model of innovations and economic growth, which departs from earlier endogenous growth models by assuming that innovations require not only labor of innovators, but also time. Each innovation has to wait till its time comes, and speeding it up is costly. This change in assumption yields a number of important results. First, the model gives rise to patent races, where many ...

Of the diverse factors motivating technological change, one factor that has received increasing attention in the recent past has been the protection of intellectual property rights. Given fairly recent changes in the international policy ethos where a regime of stronger intellectual property protection has become a fait accompli for most developing countries, it is of some significance to ask w...

We examine the role of off-path “superstitions” in macro-economics, and show how a false belief about off-path play is the key element underlying both the Lucas Critique and the game-theoretic concept of self-confirming equilibrium. However, the impact of false beliefs in these two cases is different: In the Lucas case, a policy maker’s incorrect beliefs about off-path play can lead to the adop...

This paper extends the line of research on cooperation in R&D in an oligopoly with spillovers. Departing from the existing literature, we adopt an infinite-horizon dynamic framework, incorporate uncertainty, and define technology spillover as diffusion of a new technology from an innovator to non-innovators. We consider two cooperative regimes: the R&D cartel in which firms coordinates R&D effo...